Converting Image File Format From GHO to VMDK and From VMDK to GHO

Machine Translations

In your environment you may have to use different image file format while performing imaging or cloning operations, Ghost and Vmware are widely used technologies for preparing machine either for development or for testing purpose.

Ghost treats virtual disks as images. You can image a machine to a virtual disk (create a vmdk file instead of a .gho file), and you can restore a machine from a vmdk file. While performing any imaging operation GHO is the default file format of ghost

VMDK files cannot be opened in Ghost explorer, You can mount a VMDK file by using ghost with switch –ad=<image file name>, once it is mounted can be used in all ghost operation.

You may want to use a Physical machine's Ghost image in vmdk or otherwise, you may want to use a vmdk to prepare a Physical machine .

By performing following simple commands you can convert the GHO files to VMDK and a VMDK file to GHO.

To convert from GHO to VMDK
ghost32 -clone,mode=restore,src=my.gho,dst=myimage.vmdk -batch -sure

I gave this a try, but am getting an ABORT: 11030, Invalid Destination Drive. I've tried moving ghost32.exe to the same location as my GHO file and vice versa. Moved everything to the TEMP directory. Keep getting the same error. Almost like it doesn't have permission to create the file. I am an admin on my workstation, so I am thinking that should not be a problem. (GSS 2.5 v11.0.1.1533)

Hi, I have an image file created with Ghost2003. I would like to create from this image a virtual disk for VMware. I have downloaded VMware vCenter Converter SA, but it does not support .gho files. How can I do it?

Details: The original machine has dead and I changed the motherboard in it and done I full reinstall. Before I reinstalled the OS (XP Prof) I have made a Ghost2003 image of the system. So I have a .gho image and I want to create a virtual machine in VMware.

Hi! Is it posible to convert a .gho to .vmdk with a trial version of Symantec Ghost? When I try to do it using the commmand lines mentioned before, after some time it aborts saying that Ghost32 can be used only from Symantec Ghost Console. The menus and options to create the .vmdk from the .gho are not clear to me

Hello. I have an old backup image created in .gho format that appears to be damaged. I intend to convert it to use it as a virtual machine, but the conversion process covered here throws me an error saying that my image is corrupt and then abort the operation.

Is there a tool or something that could help me recover this old image???

With Ghost Explorer, what I did was re compile the image into one file. This file, I was unable to do the conversion process covered in this thread, it just continued saying that the image was corrupt. Then, with the Ghost Boot Wizard I generated a new bootable media to install the image over Linux environment. This worked fine, the bootable recovery was done complete.

Just to add more to the case, this was done on a previously created virtual machine and there was an issue at OS boot, I believe because of hardware differences. So, then, with the image loaded in the virtual machine, I booted with a VM compatible recovery image generator and obtained a new image file. This then was converted with VMware vCenter Converter Standalone software to a completely new virtual machine. And that was it, I got a fully working virtual machin of the original image.

Good to see that your problem is resolved by yourself. For safer side, I would recommend you to take snapshot of this vm as well as gho image so that if anything goes wrong you should have backup images. It depends on how important is the image for you.

Happy new year you too...

Regards,
Nitin

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I am pretty new to virtual machines but have been using ghost for some years. I followed the instructions to create a vmdk file from a gho file and it worked first time with no problems. My question now is how do I use the vmdk file to create a virtual machine that I can use on vmware player 6?

Just to warn there is an error on the command syntax on both the sections "To create a VMDK file form machine directly" and "To restore VMDK image on machine directly". I can see from the comments people experienced the same error that I did but thought problem was something else.

Basically there is no -vmdk switch, the error message even tells you that!!! the right switch is -batch. In fact if you compare the syntax above (the part about converting) then it is obvious.

After I got the error when I typed

Ghost32 –clone,mode=create,src=1,dst=myimage.vmdk -vmdk -sure

Just changed to

Ghost32 –clone,mode=create,src=1,dst=myimage.vmdk -batch -sure

and it worked!

I haven't tried creating from vmdk to machine directly (yet) but seems pretty obvious you need to use -batch instead of -vmdk.

Can you please update the page so other users won't experience some of the issues anymore?